I have plot!

Some years ago, I acquired a cubic yard of 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s science fiction paperbacks, about 600 volumes in total. Last week I finally got around to digging into this collection. After reading two Haldemans (‘Mindbridge’ and ‘The Forever War’), I came across the excellent ‘Epoch’ anthology (edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg, 1975). I love anthologies so I started reading immediately.

The first story in the collection is ‘ARM’ by the incomparable Larry Niven. It’s a clever, fascinating and very complicated science fiction locked room mystery, but five pages into it, I knew the entire plot, the killer, the M.O. and everything.

Or so I thought.

Larry Niven’s plot danced circles around me, threw me for a loop and blew me out of the water. Even though the story is a ‘fair puzzle’ (as Niven calls it in his afterword), I’d not have guessed the plot in a million years.

I was three stories further along in the anthology before I realized that the plot I mistakenly attributed to Niven was, in fact, mine. I’ll add it to my list of things to write….